One thing for sure it seems propane isn't your answer in your area Bogie. Maybe just an oil fired boiler with DHW coil inside ? Nothing seems stable on pricing does it when you dump the propane burner you have now ? Right now oil is falling and I imagine you don't have NG in your area but that has been about the most stable.
You are correct - no NG in the area. I am thinking it would be nice to get rid of FHW altogether. It would give me a lot more options for remodeling my house; not having to work around all the water pipe in the basement and fins on the main floor. Possibly even put in electric just because it wouldn't be my main source of heat anyway. FHA is not an option, so know that is out, but just tossing ideas around in my head.
I don't know, someone would have to do some serious yacking and throw in a bridge or two to convince me on electric heat. Your hot water system is in place too, just toss in a new boiler ( just thinking out loud).
Yeah, I keep coming back to the fact that it would be a real pain to remove everything and it would be much simpler to install a new boiler. Just my house is small, and so cut up, that any room I can gain would be great. Especially in the kitchen since it is currently 7.5' x 8' and there is no way to expand it because the next wall over has 6' of water fins on it so that extra couple of feet is basically unusable.
I think you will find that the new boilers can be had fairly well insulated. Ours is about 7 years old now and compared with the old boiler I don't get any heat in the basement in the winter. The old boiler spilled enough heat so things wouldn't freeze up ( also not a good thing in it's own way but good in another). I think you will find that too, it can be set up so as to not maintain hot water but just run on demand, be that for the house or for the bath water etc (domestic). Ours is set up to just run on demand. But I'm a great one to talk because we have propane hot water (it was the wife's thing). Anyway our boiler doesn't maintain 180 deg water inside it, well this time of year it sort of ends up that way because of heating the attached apartment and heat cycle are just close enough together that it doesn't lose it's temp.
Bogie, the new boilers are fairly small for the BTU but it's really the controller installed that determines the kind of output. Todays controllers can be programmed for either type of output.
